The Evolution Of Creator Economy - I

These article series is actually a bold attempt for me because I am trying to cover almost all the perspectives of creator economy from its start & bring out the journey of creator economy from start till date, at the same trying to map creator economy & its players with various perspectives. If I miss out any perspectives here in this article, please do let me know so I will cover up in future articles.

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What are we going to cover in this article?

1. What is creator economy?
2. The Genesis & The Rise Of Creator Economy
3. What’s the market size of Creator Economy?
4. A brief history of Creator Economy & its popularity.

What is creator economy?

Creator economy is a network of various entities that powers this economy.

Creator is the epicenter in creator economy & social media platforms, brands, communities, product/service consumers, followers, content curators & content enablers help & revolve around the content creator to generate revenues.

• Social media earn revenues through supply (content published on platform) & demand (ad revenue generated from brands).
• Brands gain visibility & direct response from the social media platforms thereby maximize attention & sales.
• Communities are the cluster of content creators that grows & powers itself by engagement supported by brands/platforms/content enablers on direct or indirect basis.
• Product/service consumers trust the content of the creators & buy product/service basis their recommendations.
• Followers remain informed, entertained & engaged by the content published by creators. They act as cheer leaders for the content creators & even become product/service consumers in most of the cases.
• Content enablers are the tools & platforms that help creators & even social media platforms to generate, publish, monetize & even measure content.
• Content curators basically assemble content produced by content creators. Content curators themselves do not write or publish content.
• Content creators create, distribute, publish, promote, syndicate, whitelist & monetize content.

The Genesis & The Rise Of Creator Economy

Humans have transformed themselves from farmer - a century ago to a content creator today as far as occupation is concerned.

Let's view the transition of various economies.

Agriculture led Economy => Industrial Economy => Consumer Economy => Internet led Knowledge Economy => Internet/AI led Creator Economy => AI & Web3 powered Creator Economy

Creator Economy = Knowledge Economy ∩ Gig Economy ∩ Passion Economy (∩ = Intersection)

Global Human Population = 8 billion approx.

Global Internet Population = 5 billion approx. = 62.5% of GHP

Global Creator Population = 50 million approx & this will increase with time.

Social media has successfully managed to garner the global human attention in just last one & a half decade & that’s incredible success. Social media platforms collectively created a “virtual society” & bringing its norms, rules & guidelines as the real human society.

GenZ is a difficult generation to understand. From my personal experience, they are always online doing something every now & then. The online user behavior of GenZ is a mystery & area of research. Some common observed traits of GenZ – They want flexibility at workplace & want to travel, work & live anywhere in the world. They want independence versus a fixed life routine. They crave more for happiness, pleasures & relationships than earlier generations. They want their values & passion aligned to work rather than earlier generations who felt obliged to put food on the table. They are more prone to stress + instant gratification & always want to minimize conflicts & stress in their lives. There is a minority of GenZ who prefers to chat always than they actually speak referred to as Generation Mute. There is a minority of GenZ who loves to be indoors only than outdoors referred to as Generation Indoors.

GenZ -The internet native generation simply empowered creator economy & built a strong continuous overflowing supply for social media. ?Either social media hypnotized GenZ or GenZ took the initiative to empower social media, whatever it may be, the social media landscape has changed completely. Social media platforms are equivalent to the nations today, every kind of information can be found in the walled garden itself & it does not require branding to convince users like it did to Millennials to be on their platforms but today it’s a norm to be on social media & create content regularly irrespective of the fact whether you are an influencer or not.

The time spent on social media, the no. of posts, messages, stories & articles viewed/engaged, the no. of communities & groups that we are part of, the no. of online audio & video events we participated is simply rising day by day. A time will come in future that social media will not allow us to sleep & work, the way old platforms are getting strong & new platforms are coming up.

What’s the market size of Creator Economy?

This data is sourced from Google & looks quite promising.

• The market size of creator economy is estimated to be $104.2 billion.
• There are 50 million content creators & out of that only 2% are professional full time content creators & the rest are part -time creators.
• The global influencer marketing industry is valued at $13.8 billion today.

What are different types of content creators, influencers & methods of monetization?

Different types of content creators: Bloggers, Podcasters, Photographers, Tubers, Live streamers, Celebrities, Musicians, Sportsperson, Artists, Course creators, Course Instructors, Course curators, Gaming players, Resellers, Meme Creators, Controversy Creators & so on.

Different type of influencers based on their following: Nano Influencers (1-10K followers), Micro influencers (10K – 50K followers), Mid-tier influencers (50K - 500K influencers), Macro influencers (500K – 1Mn) followers, Mega influencers (1Mn – 10 Mn) & Celebrities (>10 Mn)

Different ways for Monetization: Brand Sponsored content, Brand exclusive content for a definite period, Tipping, Merchandizing, Paid subscriptions (Community content, newsletters) Brand consulting, Social media profile optimization, 1 to 1 meeting & coaching, 1 to many or few to many webinar, Audio events, Coffee chats, On demand - Course creation/instruction/curation, How to do/Basics/101 guides, Guest podcasting, Guest blogs, Monetizing blogs by allowing display ads on blog, Affiliate links & other miscellaneous ways.?

Still 77% of revenue for creators comes from brand deals & the rest seems to be picking up.

A brief history of Creator Economy & its popularity.

It was in 1971 Herbert Simon predicted that “A wealth of information would create an attention poverty & a dire need to allocate that attention efficiently." This scarcity which was predicted today turned to be 'engagement' in social media space.

As per Wikipedia, in 1997 Stanford University’s Paull Saffo suggested that creator economy first came into being as “the new economy”. Early creators used to work with animations & illustrations, but they were not supported by creator marketplaces which exist today to generate revenue.

There are two reasons why creator economy became the global attention economy today.

Let’s look at first reason - democratization of content & media. The mass attention was very much controlled by traditional media & it was quite centralized, not everyone could get an opportunity to raise their voice & make an impact with the audience. Now, with the advent of internet, the knowledge economy started gaining power & media started becoming decentralized gradually. And as social media & even open internet started gaining popularity due to their increased user & subscriber base, the mass attention gradually shifted to knowledge economy. Creator economy is nothing but a sort of upgradation to knowledge economy where the media is becoming democratized & decentralized than earlier & today with sophisticated tools & platforms of all sorts to help creators to create content i.e., active contributors on the social media space who can create the best quality content.

Let's look at second reason - The powershift from traditional to digital in ad revenues. Newspapers are gradually getting replaced by online publishers, Radio by music streaming & podcasting platforms, TV by connected TV & OTT players, Outdoor by DOOH & even digital publishers prime ad properties & these transitions from traditional to digital are super massive. We can infer here that future is digital in marketing. Now as the digital gained massive audience, why take the support of passive traditional marketing channels & traditional agencies & why let them earn & govern the ad dollars, the social media & open internet together are able to fetch maximum ad budgets & deliver ROI for brand campaigns. That became possible because creator economy created massive supply of attention & platforms were able to capitalize on that through demand. Today it's compulsive norm for brands to be on social channels & opt for performance + influencer marketing. This is a huge power shift from traditional to digital.

Today, it’s a different case that global attention is in the hands of few social media & few tech giants & they are creating echo chambers. Also, there is conflict of interest because platforms represent supply & platforms represent demand (i.e., in complex ad editor tools platforms represent brands & govern audience, bids & creatives in publishing & promoting ad campaigns). In future, I hope with web3 in future, the power shifts from platforms to creator communities.

Let’s look at some of the events which shaped creator economy., Image credits to Shopify.

So, what we can learn from the history of creator economy & how we can connect the dots of the past to the present & the future of creator economy which is reserved for the next post.

#creatoreconomy #influencermarketing #influencer #creator #genz

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